Well, this is goodbye

I think zoeego has come to a natural end. I keep writing drafts and not wanting to post them and I think what this means is that deep down I don’t want to write here anymore.

Tomorrow is the last day of the decade so in a way it’s fitting to leave it here, preserve my vaguely neurotic ponderings forever in the teens of the Century. I didn’t start this blog to show off about my life, or build a massive following, or get rich and famous (although still up for that if anyone’s game?). I guess I just wanted to make people laugh a bit internally.

What a wonderful decade it’s been. My first decade of real adult life. It kicked off when I was nineteen and a half, no doubt worrying a little bit about entering my twenties and hoping I’d be able to forge some kind of career for myself. I can’t remember what I did for New Year’s Eve at the start of the 2010s but I do know (thanks to a quick scour of Facebook’s timeline feature) that I wrote this insightful little gem that I intend to have made into a t-shirt:

Shortly after whatever event prompted this irritatingly vague status update (I’m guessing a hangover), I successfully graduated from uni with a grade that, to this day, causes me immense pain. You see, I was 0.2% off the threshold for a first class English degree. Now I am 2:1 Zoe forever and I think I will spend the rest of my life ALMOST being good at something because there will always be (a very persuasive) 0.2% of me that just wants to kick back and achieve absolutely nothing.

Not very interesting fact: in 10 years I’ve visited 16 countries(I’m counting Wales)

The year before my birth my grandparents bought a ruin in South France and started the long, challenging task of rebuilding it. This meant that every summer we’d go on a long drive down through the country, camping along the way and eating a lot of crusty bread and strong cheese at the sides of roads. Although these holidays form some of my happiest memories, I remember wishing that once in a while we could just be normal and fly to some all-inclusive Spanish resort with a chlorinated pool instead of all that stupid wild swimming in rivers, lakes and glacial waterfalls. Such are the woes of privileged children. Of course I knew how lucky I was really, but going to the same country every single year did embed within me a deep and urgent desire to travel a little further, to cross those damn Pyrenees for once.

I have always been obsessed with going further than I’ve ever been before, geographically. I like to know exactly where I am in relation to everywhere else in the world. It excites me immensely to discover I can successfully exist in other parts of the planet to where I usually am. I love talking to people about the places they’ve been. Sometimes I’m even excited by produce that comes from far flung destinations.

This decade I didn’t (as I thought I might) set off with a knapsack to aimlessly roam the Earth’s natural wonders, but I did go on some incredible holidays in between sending zillions of words out into cyberspace to pay my bills. Here’s a collage I made of some of the places I’ve been in the 2010s:

See – there’s me existing in other places.

I’ve lived, I’ve lovedAND I’ve laughed

As demanded by every ubiquitous framed motivational quote from The Range, I have partaken in all the Ls this decade, in abundance. Physical travel is nothing on the emotional roller coaster of life. Not many people go through their entire 20s unscathed by love’s double-edged sword, and neither did I – but the risk was worth it and I believe it always will be.

I worried way too much about being a little bit fat

Quite frankly I think I might have had an eating disorder. The most popular posts on this blog are, annoyingly, the ones I wrote about Herbalife when I tried to get very quickly a bit skinnier in a moment of self-loathing desperation a few years ago. In fact I think I rank #1 on Google for ’21 day Herbalife challenge’, which is not very good for Herbalife because I end the post revealing that I was horrendously sick after a week of meal replacement shakes (surprise surprise), and quite strongly urge people not to do it.

These days I still follow a somewhat militant exercise regime but my main goal now is less about fat and more about keeping madness at bay. I think I’ve accepted that my body will always be keeping some fat reserves because of the impending apocalypse. Sensible, really. Also I like food and I’m bored of being insecure about my body because the other thing I’ve finally accepted this decade is that nobody cares. And once you accept that nobody cares, life suddenly becomes weirdly easier.

What’s in store for the 2020s?

I don’t know. It’s impossible to say. All I know is that my days of blogging here are over. Thank you for following me, reading me, sending me messages to say you liked my posts, or they made you laugh. Those messages filled me with immense joy, just to know people were getting some kind of enjoyment from these posts, which have always been a bit aimless and meandering.

I will probably start a new blog at some point, but it will be a little bit different.

Related

Published by Zoe

28 years old, trained journalist, professional writer and aspiring novelist. I'm based in the beautiful English town of Eastbourne, I have two guinea pigs who live in my spare room, and I love food. Not cooking it, just eating it. I also like beer and staring out to sea.
View more posts